What is Converged Infrastructure?

Converged Infrastructure is the emerging term used to describe the consolidation of layers of IT architecture that have traditionally been managed as separate components. These components include servers, storage, networks and the software required to orchestrate the operation and ongoing management of these new converged appliances.

There are massive benefits to migrating your infrastructure to a converged infrastructure and onto public, private or hybrid cloud computing environments, either big bang or slowly over time. Given the age of many of our systems and applications, the journey to converged infrastructure is not for the faint of heart but the prize is huge. Follow the link to an article I recently wrote for Government CIO on this topic.

Heather Campbell is Executive Vice President, Transformation. Heather specializes in supporting organizations that are undergoing complex IT Transformations. As the former CIO of Canadian Pacific, Heather led a highly successful three-year transformation and modernization of the IT portfolio until spring 2012.

Previously Heather was the COO, IT Division, Global Retail and Commercial Bank at Barclays PLC based in London, UK. There she led an IT transformation under the banner of “Getting IT Right”, a three-year £240M investment program focused on fixing IT services, improving productivity & efficiency, introducing greater transparency to the business and directing investments in platforms and services appropriate to a top five leading global bank.

Heather has held executive positions at Rogers Communications Inc., BMO Financial Group as well as senior management positions at CIBC and KPMG.

Heather has won numerous industry awards for her work in IT including a CIO Canada award for teamwork in the development of an online trading system for BMO Nesbitt Burns private clients. In 2012 she was the only Canadian CIO to receive a Transformation CIO Award for her work at Canadian Pacific from the CIO Executive Forum based in Boston.

Heather has an MBA from Queens University and is a graduate of the Directors Education Program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Talk to Heather about the future role of the CIO.

From the Blog

Michele Taylor With Larry DeBoever & Heather Campbell In Clayton Christiansen’s book titled the Innovator’s Dilemma he discusses the concept of disruptive change that happens only every 25 years or so. While innovations in the high-tech space appear daily – we believe that Converged Infrastructure (CI) is disruptive change that fits into that category of [...]